Brain scans reveal that ‘we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way people generally suppose’.
Julian Baggini is that happy thing – a philosopher who recognises that readers go glassy-eyed if presented with high-octane philosophical discourse. And yet, as his latest book, Freedom Regained: The Possibility of Free Will, makes clear, it is in all our interests to consider crucial aspects of what it means to be human. Indeed, in this increasingly complex world, maybe more so than ever.
Freedom is one of the great, emotive political watchwords. The emancipation of slaves and women has inspired political movements on a grand scale. But, latterly, the concept of freedom has defected from the public realm to the personal. How responsible are we as individuals for the actions we take? To what degree are we truly autonomous agents?
The argument that environmental circumstances are crucial determinates on our actions – the “Officer Krupke” argument (from the West Side Story song: “Gee, Officer Krupke, we’re very upset/We never had the love that every child ought to get”) – has for some time carried weight, not least in the defence of violent crime. Defective genes are also a common part of the artillery in the argument against the possibility of free choice. Excessive testosterone and low resting heart rates, for example, both statistically bias a person towards violence. And now neuroscience brings us the unnerving news that while even the most sane, genetically well endowed and law-abiding of us believe we make free choices, the evidence of brain scans suggests otherwise.
Neuroscience reveals the seemingly novel fact that “we are not the authors of our thoughts and actions in the way people generally suppose”. I say “seemingly novel”, for it is no news that many of our apparently willed choices have unconscious determinates, which are at variance from our known wishes and desires. The whole of psychoanalysis is predicated on that principle but, as anyone who can drive a car will attest, often routine physical actions take their source from an internalised history rather than any conscious decision-making. The neural information that has made waves, however, is the fact that scans indicates the brain’s chemistry consistently determines a decision prior to our consciously making that decision. So when I deliberate over a menu and finally choose a mushroom risotto over a rare steak, my brain has anticipated this before I am aware of my choice.
At first, this looks alarming. I am not the mistress of my gastric fate, my brain chemistry is. But that is to fail to recognise that my brain’s chemistry may be responding to a vast array of accumulated information about my reading of restaurant reviews, my health, the kind of day I’ve had, my relationship to my weight, my dining companion, my views on animal rights. This is a process not dissimilar to intuition, which is no more than the mind’s ability to process a number of clues too complex to be consciously registered.
But, one is inclined to say, so what? And “so what”, in a calmer, more authoritative key, is the essence of Baggini’s excellent book. He wisely eschews the role of priest at the shrine of the oracle, preferring to share with us conversations he has had on the subject of freedom. The larger number of these conversations, as befits a book seeking to restore some respectable idea of free agency, is with the free will naysayers.
The book’s central argument is that while it may be true that we could not in any given circumstance have acted otherwise, that is an impoverished definition of freedom and by no means the same as saying we have no freedom to choose. Our choices may be rooted in our physiology, our genetic makeup, but out of these arises something that was once called “character”, and it is this that is the final arbiter on choice.
Character is the complex accumulation of our history but also our thoughts, experiences, feelings and sympathies – in fact, all those very human qualities that endow life with meaning. As Baggini puts it: “You do not find freedom by being the author of your own preferences and wants. You find freedom by being able to reflect on, endorse and express those preferences and wants.” He quotes the philosopher Michael Frede, who, interestingly, notes the absence of the idea of a free will in antiquity. In its place is the notion of the good life being one made up of right choices made by “freeing oneself of false beliefs and irrational attachments and aversions”. I propose to pursue this path by choosing the Baggini concept of freedom over the more parochial neuroscientists.
